[OPEN-ILS-DEV] Improving Evergreen's OPAC Search

[Mike Rylander]

On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 1:37 PM, Chad G. Hansen <cgh at byu.edu> wrote:
> I am part of a team of researchers in the Brigham Young University Computer
> Science department who are interested in improving the searching used by
> Evergreen's OPAC interface.
> Others on the team have come up with a fast and effective way to do
> searching using folksonomies which greatly increases relevance of results
> and we are interested in adding that system to one of the open-source
> library systems out there. We are considering both Koha and Evergreen for
> this.
> We would like to have the Open-ILS community's involvement as much as
> possible.
>
> We would like to either enhance the existing search algorithm of Evergreen
> or replace it with our own search.
>
> We would like to know if anyone is interested in being involved with this?
> We would also like to get any pointers on how possible and how difficult
> this might be for our team to do this, keeping in mind that we are newish to
> the library specific protocols and formats (MARC, Z39.50, etc).
>

We would be interested in hearing your ideas, certainly.  If you'd
like to share some details of your proposed algorithm, and perhaps
research output if your team has written any papers, that would be a
great first step.

Search is a complicated beast, as is Evergreen in general, so we can't
really talk about replacing or integrating anything without
understanding what this new piece is so that we can help you consider
the consequences (positive or negative) that any new code may have on
other areas of the system.

-- 
Mike Rylander
 | VP, Research and Design
 | Equinox Software, Inc. / The Evergreen Experts
 | phone:  1-877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457)
 | email:  miker at esilibrary.com
 | web:  http://www.esilibrary.com